Cultural hegemony is a concept developed by Italian scholar and activist Antonio Gramsci, which refers to the dominance of a culturally diverse society by the ruling class who manipulate the culture of that society—the beliefs and explanations, perceptions, values, and mores—so that the worldview of the ruling class becomes the worldview of the society. Cultural hegemony is achieved through ideological or cultural means, usually through social institutions, which allow those in power to strongly influence the values, norms, ideas, expectations, worldview, and behavior of the rest of society.

Cultural hegemony is not a monolithic intellectual praxis or a unified system of values, but a complex of social relations produced by the social stratification of the individual social structures of a society; the social class system and the social strata of each class. The supremacy of the ruling class manifests itself in two distinct ways, according to Gramsci. It manifests both in domination and in intellectual or moral leadership, the latter constituting the notion of hegemony. Whilst the mode of domination serves to externally limit the choices of the subjects, the mode of hegemony carves the values of the ruling order within the subject itself so that their choices are experienced as free instead of restricted.

Cultural hegemony is achieved through social institutions like education, media, family, religion, politics, and law, among others. These institutions do the work of socializing people into the norms, values, and beliefs of the dominant social group. As such, the group that controls these institutions controls the rest of society. Cultural hegemony is most strongly manifested when those ruled by the dominant group come to believe that the economic and social conditions of their society are natural and inevitable, rather than created by people with a vested interest.

In summary, cultural hegemony is the dominance of a culturally diverse society by the ruling class who manipulate the culture of that society through social institutions, so that the worldview of the ruling class becomes the worldview of the society. It is achieved through ideological or cultural means, and it is most strongly manifested when those ruled by the dominant group come to believe that the economic and social conditions of their society are natural and inevitable, rather than created by people with a vested interest.